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After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
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I dont understand the reference to “Copybook Headings”
Anonymous would be me; I’m not ashamed of my ignorance of Victorian era arcana
Schoolchildren used to practice writing by copying sentences in a copybook. Usually, in Kipling’s day, the sentences were well-known proverbs, Psalms, or the like. There’s an example of a copybook page at 0:22 in the above video.
“No! I’m not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you, I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?”
Thank you so much, Julie. It would be the equivalent of Catechism class for Catholic kids. And a whole lot of Catholics would be fitting subjects for poem/essay.
They “outgrew” their Catholic grounding, in the same way some Brits outgrew the wisdom found in their copybooks. .And what was the result …
I get it now, I really do.
C. S. Lewis wrote about modern, wretched British education in one of his Narnia books, from the 1950s. My own public school education was the squalid remnants in the barrel of modern education. Over the last decade, for me, it has been a pleasure reading manly, Christian poetry.
I suspect it’s time for Recessional to be updated as well for the present day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WBra_BjJQY
One good memorable verse deserves another.
https://youtu.be/cOGHCzuinBw
ErisGuy. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the greatest novels ever written both for substance and style.